'Slant of Sun' author used work with disabled son as source

Beth Kephart was writing about her son, Jeremy, long before she knew that there was ''something different'' about him.

She and her husband first began suspecting that there might be something different about Jeremy when he was 2.

By the time he was 21/2, they had confirmation in the form of a diagnosis: Jeremy had something called ''pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified.''

His behavior included running in circles, echoing the words of other people, and fixating on a bright green hat.

In ''A Slant of Sun: One Child's Courage'' (W.W. Norton), which was nominated for a National Book Award, Kephart relates in elegant, often poetic, prose how she and her husband, Bill, worked to enter Jeremy's mind and help steer him toward what society might view as ''normal'' behavior.

Jeremy's disorder ''falls within the autistic spectrum, but there are some differences,'' Kephart said in a recent interview.

''One of the biggest breakthroughs came when we threw the labels out and said, 'Jeremy is who Jeremy is. He is the exact same wonderful little person he was yesterday, before this diagnosis, as he is today.' We don't and we really never have looked at Jeremy as being labeled.''

Kephart writes about ''Jeremy's terrific bravery and courage as he himself fights through some of the murkiness in his own life. Communication was difficult for him. His fine and gross motor skills were difficult for him.''

Kephart explains that Jeremy had a hard time doing such things as holding a spoon, using crayons and catching a ball.

''In terms of language, it meant that while we could see that Jeremy was, and is, an incredibly intelligent little guy, the language just wasn't there for him. ... He would echo things, or then when he meant to say, 'I'd like juice,' he'd say, 'You'd like juice.'

''We understood what he was thinking because we learned to watch what he was doing with his toys and what he was taking an interest in. We knew it was all there, we were just going to have to get to it through a different route.''

Kephart says that no drugs were used in his treatment: ''He never even took an aspirin. Just Tylenol Flu for a fever.''

''Things were very challenging, but he did not give up,'' Kephart adds.

''We didn't try to train him to be normal. We tried to get inside his head, inside his world.''

Kephart says that although she and her husband had been told not to expect empathy from their son, through storytelling he did come to empathize with both fictional and real characters.

And there has been progress. Remarkable progress.

''By the age of 5, Jeremy was in a traditional kindergarten without an aide, doing extremely well,'' Kephart says, adding, ''He continues to progress. He continues to break through the glass ceiling that folks might want to put on top of children diagnosed with this.''

Kephart says that ''if you were around him today, you would think that he was very normal. A shy kid. I think his speech is a little bit slower and he doesn't have the neatest handwriting in the classroom. And those are probably the only residual differences.''

Kephart recalls, ''For me, one of the greatest moments was when Jeremy asked me the first question about myself. Rather than sort of informational conversation, he was actually thinking to himself, 'Wait, I want to know this about Mom.' ''

Kephart recalls in particular just last year when a novel that she had written was returned from a publisher with a rejection slip, and Jeremy began trying to come up with ways for her to cope with the news.

" 'Do you think you could rewrite it, Mom? Do you think you could send it to another publisher? I'm sure you're still a good writer but maybe they just didn't like the story.' So he was trying to help me through it. He does it all the time.''

While working so intensively with Jeremy, Kephart was also trying to steal a few hours, mostly at night, to pursue her freelance career writing speeches and other reports for pharmaceutical corporations.

After writing that first novel, set in El Salvador, Kephart has written another, set in Spain, which she has just submitted to a publisher. She's now working on another nonfiction book.

Kephart, 38, was born in Wilmington and raised in ''many places,'' thanks to her father's career as an oil company executive. She's a Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied the history and sociology of science.

She and her husband, an architect, and Jeremy, 9, live in suburban Philadelphia, where Jeremy enjoys playing soccer with other kids and rollerblading with his mother.

She says that not only has she read ''A Slant of Sun'' to Jeremy, but that he actually helped her write it. Especially the chapter called ''From Here to There.''

When writing that chapter, Kephart says, she asked Jeremy, who has ''a tremendous specific memory for some things, not for others,'' to help her recall a conversation.

''He went through it and gave me our conversation back verbatim,'' she says with a mother's pride.